SWIFT and Ripple aren’t partnering – they’re battling each other

Swift and Ripple will be continuing to go head to head this year, as rumours of a partnership come to nothing…

by Manoj Sharma for CNR

Over the last couple of years, many cryptocurrency proponents, especially those who side with XRP, have debated about a possible partnership between SWIFT and Ripple. Since Ripple has continuously been bigging up its achievements on social networks, press releases, and events, most of the users in the crypto community consider the partnership to be a ‘natural’ step in the evolution of finance sector.

However, any hope of a union between the pair – and it was a long shot at best – has been extinguished by a new announcement.

It came from SWIFT, who published an article on its official website about the latest advancement of its own system, based on the use of blockchain technologies. The SWIFT GPI system proactively processes interbank transactions quickly, inexpensively and frictionlessly, it argues.

Christof Hofmann, Global Head and Managing Director of Payments and Collection Products, Deutsche Bank, Germany, said that “we believe the GPI pre-validation service will add significant value to our clients, increasing the overall GPI client experience. Beneficiary account validation addresses an important pain-point in cross-border payments; it will help increase STP ratios while reducing fraud and exception handling.”

SWIFT is using Hyperledger technology to develop its own blockchain-based solution. So partnering with Ripple doesn’t make sense for the financial giant.

That said, a spokesperson at SWIFT confirmed on November 8th 2018 that the company isn’t working with Ripple to develop its blockchain-based solution. “I’m not sure where those rumours are coming from but the upcoming standards release … is entirely unrelated to RippleNet”, they said.

“Its primary purpose is to ensure all payments include a tracking reference (UETR, Unique End-to-end Transaction Reference) which will allow banks to track their GPI payments end-to-end in real time”.

On the other side, Cory Johnson has clarified the rumours, stating that Ripple intends to offer a product that competes with SWIFT and, probably, replaces it in the future. Expect more details on that at some point this year…